Principles of Economics Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Principles of Economics - Essay Example Q1. You own a local sub shop in a college town. You primarily serve two groups of people: local residents (both students and other local residents) and visitors to your town. Devise a price discrimination strategy that will increase your revenues compared to a single-pricing strategy. A1. Although, there may be a plethora of available price discrimination policies for a variety of different businesses, for a fast food eatery there are a number of simplistic strategies that could be employed to help increase revenues over a single price strategy. Firstly, the sub shop could advertise students to 'show their student card' for a predetermined discount. As for other residents fliers could be distributed to the houses in the community with a 'customer loyalty card attached'. These loyalty cards could also be presented for a predetermined discount. As visitors passing through the town would not have access to these types of identification they would be charged full price. According to Tutor2u (2011) this strategy would accomplish charging a higher price for an identical good (In this case food) for a reason that is not associated with an increase in costs. Q2. Suppose the cable TV industry is currently unregulated. However, due to complaints from consumers that the pric e of cable TV is too high, the legislature is considering placing a price ceiling on cable TV below the current equilibrium price. If the government does make this price ceiling law, diagram and explain the effects with supply and demand analysis. If the cable TV company is worried about disgruntling customers, suppose that the company may introduce a different type of programming that is cheaper for the company to provide yet is equally appealing to customers. Explain what would be the effects of this action. A2- In this example, if the government were to impose a price decrease from Price $(A) to Price $(B) this would naturally drive the demand from its Equilibrium level to a level of Q(B). However, the cable company may not want to provide all of this excess service to new customers (Owing to high costs associated with new cable lines etc) so it is likely that this government imposed decrease in price would be driven from Equilibrium to Q(A) resulting in a shortage of supply. Nat urally, this action would enrage customers. What the company may choose to do is offer a price discrimination strategy wherein they could charge the new government imposed low price for a basic service cable service and continue a higher price strategy for a more premium service. Q3. Consider a perfectly competitive market. Analyze and explain in detail using graphical tools to show what you expect to happen to the number of firms and firm profitability in the short run and long run a) if demand for the product falls and b) if demand for the product rises. A3. As you can see from the above graph, if in a perfectly competitive market the quantity demanded for a product increases the demand curve will shift to the right and the price of a good will increase in the short term (Which would have a positive effect on the profitability of a firm). However, because the market is perfectly competitive more players would enter this market which would effectively drive the price down until its original equilibrium was once again attained. However the opposite could also hold true, insofar as if the demand for a good decreases the price of goods would also decrease (Which would have negative consequences for firms operating in this market). At this point several firms would no longer compete in this market and the quantity of goods supplied would decrease which would drive the price of goods back to its original position. Q4- Discuss why some long-run average cost curves are steeper on the